Paul Banksley sounded furious. I’d never heard the iconic vacuum salesman-turned-22nd Century Skills impresario like this. The avid TED Talker and founder of Tomorrows Are for Tomorrow is, after all, famed for his relentless good cheer.

“I’m being harassed by lawyers!” he thundered, with equal parts shock and disdain. “The law firm of Finch, Brockovich, Matlock, and Mason has filed a class-action suit against us, if you can believe it! They’re representing students who say they’ve been “harmed by irresponsible pedagogy’ and that our work ‘lacks a credible evidentiary base and is akin to quack medicine.’ The nerve!”

“Wow, I didn’t see that coming,” I mused. “Usually, you can get away with anything in education.”

“Right?!” he said. “We paid researchers lots of money for the research we have. I’ve got their credible evidence right here!” He made a rude gesture.

“Get a load of this first sentence,” he continued, exasperated. In a tone laced with mock superciliousness, he read:

On behalf of students and teachers across the nation, we demand that Tomorrows Are for Tomorrow, and all its officers, directors, and affiliated entities, immediately cease and desist from all further use of any language or promotion which may reasonably be construed as false, deceptive, or misleading regarding the demonstrated benefits of 22nd Century Skills, agentic AI, or career pathways.

Once he’d read it, I didn’t quite get his frustration. “Wait a minute,” I said. “They’re just asking you not say anything false or misleading. Surely that’s not a problem?”

Banksley looked at me as if I were a dog who recited the alphabet.

“Sometimes I’m not sure you understand educational innovation,” he began. “We inhabit an aspirational praxis, one where we envision transformational potentialities and nurture them via a deep-seated, future-facing belief in the urgency of now. That requires language that summons untapped opportunities to unlock crucial philanthropic support.”

“I see,” I said. Though I’m afraid I didn’t. Not really.

“We can’t do that while hewing to narrow, pedantic, legalistic notions of demonstrable truth. Don’t you see? We deal not in likelihoods but in the exploration of wondrous, untrodden paths of progress!”

“Oh, I get it! I exclaimed. “You need to be able to prevaricate and exaggerate.”

He sighed wearily. Guess I still didn’t get it. “Look, we need to be free to paint in shades of pastel possibility,” he said. “Just because a program hasn’t worked in the past and doesn’t work today doesn’t mean it won’t work in the future. Take 22nd Century Skills. Can we technically ‘demonstrate’ or ‘prove’ that they lead to better academic outcomes? Well, no, not as such.”

He paused.

“But we can make the case,” Banksley continued, “that there are hints that some applications of our core intuitions may lead to an exciting array of innovative practices with regards to emotive and equitable benchmarks. And this, of course—supported by best practices, AI-infused classrooms, and added investment—is the way to usher in a future of personalized, permissionless educational transformation.”

“Well, I’d never really thought about it that way,” I said. Not sure I could have even if I’d tried.

“That’s the thing,” he said, drumming his fingers on the desktop. “Education innovators are on a magic-making search for solution-ness. That’s the beating heart of our work. Just recently, for instance, we’ve been very supportive of the final report from the Commission on Purposeful Pathways. As the press release so elegantly put it, ‘Access to high-quality advising, accelerated college coursework sequences and career-connected learning are essential for every student to be well prepared for life after high school. These are not nice-to-haves; they are must-haves.’”

He savored the words.

“See, now that’s magic-making,” he enthused. “It looks past the dreary is to the alluring ought. Can we ‘demonstrate’ that access to these things is essential? Of course not. Can we ‘prove’ that they’re must-haves? Nope. But it feels true, doesn’t it? We’re weaving new realities. That’s the role of an innovator! That’s what the funders are paying us for!”

As ever, I was struck by the clarity of Banksley’s vision.

“Stay with me now,” he said. “For national AI Literacy Day last month, we amplified the National Center on Education and the Economy’s follow-up to the 2024 Framework for AI-Powered Learning Environments. The report was pure poetry: ‘To effectively respond to the commodification of knowledge and the equity paradox—ALL learners need to develop the ability to contextualize knowledge within broader conceptual frameworks.’ It even called for ‘Future-Ready Learners,’ ‘Future-Oriented Teaching,’ and ‘Future-Fluent Leadership.’”

He leaned forward. “Now, can I ‘prove’ that learners should be future-ready or that teachers should be future-oriented?” He shrugged. “Maybe not at this very moment. But it sure feels like they should. And I can tell you I haven’t met many funders who are eager to support future-unready learners.”

“But what’s it mean to be ‘future-ready’?” I asked. “Do we even know?”

“My good fellow,” he shook his head sadly. “You’re no different than the lawyers. Trapped in small-minded presentism. I thought you were better than that.”

I felt like I’d let Banksley down. How could I go on? He went on.

“How did we reach the moon?” Banksley asked. “How did we cure polio? By sweating over picayune details and worrying about what researchers could ‘prove’? No! It was about vision!! The rest is just footnotes.”

“That’s a compelling take,” I said. “But it does seem at times like education reformers just aren’t that interested in the hard, ugly work of improvement.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Banksley allowed.

“Well,” I said, “I frequently think about an anecdote told to me a long time ago by Don McAdams, the ringleader of Houston’s reform-minded school board in the 1990s.”

“Okay,” Banksley said a bit impatiently.

“Well,” I continued, “Don had penned a manuscript about the decade-long battle to turn around Houston’s schools. It was a page-turner about the adult interests that frustrated their efforts at every step. He titled the book The Children Come Last. Well, by the time it finally got published, it wasn’t under that title. The publisher deemed it too dark; they feared it wouldn’t sell.”

“True! Hope sells,” Banksley observed.

“Do you know what they wound up titling this gritty tale of political hardball?” I asked. “Fighting to Save Our Urban Schools . . . and Winning! Lessons from Houston. Seems to me that there’s a larger lesson here about K–12’s distaste for the hard, boring work of improvement.”  

“I don’t know about that,” said Banksley. “But that exclamation point surely was a stroke of genius. That’s optimism! That’s gumption! That’s possibility!” He got a dreamy look in his eyes. “That’s the key to educational innovation, you know. That’s how you generate dynamic keynotes and energize funders. And that’s what I fear the bean-counters and truth fanatics and blasted lawyers will never understand.”

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”